“Hopeful newlyweds, coughing factory workers, old sharecroppers with hands hardened by years of labor, all bit into the sweet juicy oranges and thought they tasted heaven,” she writes. According to Revoyr, the Mesa was once a place of racial diversity and ethnic harmony, a garden spot where palm trees and orange trees grew side by side. The setting of “Southland” is a neighborhood once called Angeles Mesa and now known as the Crenshaw District. Along the way, however, Jackie rediscovers a time and place in the recent history of Los Angeles that the author conjures up as nothing less than a paradise. Essentially, the novel is a murder mystery: The young heroine, Jackie Ishida, embarks upon a quest to find out whether her beloved grandfather once bloodied his hands in a multiple homicide. The plot of “Southland” by Nina Revoyr is distinctly noir, but the point of view is surprisingly rosy.
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